2023 Oscar nominations: Voting and ballot counting explained in three easy steps

The 2023 Oscar nominations round of voting in 15 races ends on Jan. 17 after just six days of voting. Nominations for the 95th Academy Awards will be announced on Jan. 24. The contenders in acting, directing, writing and the craft categories (except makeup/hairstyling and visual effects) will be selected under the preferential system that has been in place for years. To illustrate how this method of ballot counting works, let’s apply it to last year’s Best Actor race.

Between our experts (journalists who cover this beat year-round), website editors and readers like you, we cast 8.377 nomination ballots for Best Actor. (By comparison, the actors branch of the academy had 1,363 members last year.) As per the preferential system, we sorted these ballots by first choice and only those women listed at the top of at least one ballot continued on in the process.

There are five nominees for Best Actor. In our scenario, the initial threshold — i.e., magic number — for a nomination was set at 1,397 votes (i.e., 8,377 divided by 6 and rounded up). If each of five men reaches this cut-off, they will account for 6,985 votes, making it mathematically impossible for a sixth actor to get more than 1,392 votes.

Will Smith (“King Richard”) had 5,395 first-place votes and earned a bid (as he did in the actual nominations). Usually, these ballots would be set to one side at this point.

However, this newly minted nominee was so popular that he reaped at least 20% more first place votes than needed to be nominated — in our scenario that is 1,397  — thus triggering the surplus rule (Best Picture balloting invokes the surplus rule with a 10% excess). The rationale for this rule is to ensure that someone can vote for a hugely popular contender without fear that their ballot doesn’t matter.

When this happens, the ballots for this nominee are apportioned as follows: a share goes to the nominee such that they reach the needed number for a nomination and the remaining share goes to the contender below them on the ballot who is still in the running and not yet nominated.

Smith only needed 1,397 first-place votes to reach the initial threshold so each of his 5,395 votes is apportioned with .259 of the vote staying with her and .741 going to the actor listed in second place, assuming he got at least one first-place vote from someone to remain eligible and is not already deemed to be a nominee. Those fractional votes are the equivalent of 3,998 ballots in all.

Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”) had 1,926 first-place votes. As with Smith, that haul triggered the surplus rule, with a split of .725 for Cumberbatch and .275 for the second-place choice.

And so ends round one with two of the five slots filled.

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Before beginning round two, a new second threshold needs to be calculated based on the ballots remaining in the process and the number of nominees still left to be determined.

We started with 8,377 ballots and have removed 7,321 [5,395 (Smith) + 1,926 (Cumberbatch)] leaving 1,056.

As there are three spots left, we divide these 1,056 ballots by four and round up giving us a new second threshold of 265. If three actors each got this many votes they would account for 795 votes, leaving only 261 in play.

Andrew Garfield (“tick, tick… Boom!”) had 576 votes initially and would have become the third nominee at this stage.

Denzel Washington (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”) came into this round with 162 first-place votes. Perhaps he received enough of the fractional votes from the surplus rule applied to those ballots listing Smith and Cumberbatch first to reach this new threshold to become the fourth nominee, as he was in actuality.

Before beginning round three, a new third threshold is calculated. We remove Garfield’s 576 ballots and Washington’s 162 from the 1,056 that were used in round two, leaving a new total of 318. With one spot left, we divide that by two and round up for a new third threshold of 160. If one actor achieves this, there will only be 158 votes in play.

At this point, the accountants redistribute the ballots of the actor with the fewest first-place votes to the next actor further down on the ballot who is still in search of a nomination. The accountants look on each of these ballots for the next highest-ranked actor still in the running. This will be done with the ballots of each actor who has the least first-place votes until someone reaches the new threshold of 160.

The eventual fifth nominee was Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), who started with 21 votes.

While the Best Picture champ is determined by a version of this preferential system, the winners of the other races are those that top the popular vote — i.e, a voter chooses just one of the nominees and the Oscar goes to the that nominee with the most votes.

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